Dragon1-1

Given that there are examples of people with no experience managing to take down GA aircraft and survive (with ATC guidance), I'm willing to say you're exaggerating the issue again. Mythbusters managed to land a professional airliner sim with ATC talkdown. If you actually make an attempt to learn proper flying technique, as opposed to just jumping in and flying around, then sim experience could probably make a difference here. You know, questions such as "where to find the gear lever". Yes, the sensations matter. Sim training is not a guarantee that you won't freeze or do something dumb in the real thing. However, it might be used to familiarize yourself with basic concepts that you need to survive a landing. I'm not claiming you can learn real flying only by jumping into the sim and fooling around until you can sort-of fly. I'm claiming that you can use it to practice procedures, familiarize yourself with the physics, and with how to read the instruments. That's more or less what sims are used for in professional training, but it requires a healthy dose of RTFM and reading up on theory, or at least flying proper training missions that explain how to properly execute the maneuvers. The point is, being able to read instruments and fly using them, as you typically do in a sim, can compensate for not being able to fly with your backside. Just because it's nice and sunny outside doesn't mean you can't use the variometer to judge your rate of descent instead of eyeballing it. I wasn't the one asking about it (and besides, I have my doubts about that module being much good for anything), but it can be used to teach basic principles of flight. I don't know if it's got all the peculiarities of props modeled (the WWII fighters do), but I think we need to clarify whether you're arguing about simulation in general (which also includes other sims) or about the Yak-52 specifically, which is a much lower bar, and not even representative of other props in DCS. Also, the Yak-52 has a nasty trap in it: the AH is an old Soviet type that indicates pitch in reverse. I wouldn't recommend anyone fly that when also learning a real plane (unless the real one also has that type of AH). It shouldn't be a problem in VFR, but in IFR, learning this kind of thing wrong can kill you. Also, the cockpit is metric, which can also be confusing, especially if your charts are in feet and knots (the L-39 can switch between metric and imperial instruments, not sure if the Yak can).

You seem to be specifically talking about a prop driven GA aircraft with minimum flight instrumentation. What you say is not true in general, for instance in the Tomcat, for instance, you can barely hear the engines running, they're drowned out by the ECS fan. In an airliner, you don't listen to the engines, either, they're deliberately made to be quiet, after all, not to mention they're far away. I think you're making a bigger deal of those small details than they actually are. Larger aircraft (or fancier GA ones) aren't flown by "flying sensation", they're flown by looking at the flight instruments, something that'll be familiar to a simmer. In fact, I've heard actual pilots caution against relying too much on the seat of pants feeling, and on cues that you mention. In fact, trusting the seat of pants over the dials had killed a few pilots, mostly GA, but at least one airliner, too. Assuming they aren't confused by the seat of pants feeling existing in the real plane, a simmer will have a correct instinct to start scanning the gauges and adjust controls based on that. More than that, a sim does teach you how to read those gauges in first place, which isn't necessarily obvious. Why not? Other than the fact we fly fighters in DCS, which are very different animals to something like a Cessna, we landing properly is an essential skill. You can learn the proper sight picture if you fly in VR, the bouncing requires a motion platform, but applying proper landing technique is very useful in the sim. Likewise, proper climbing, diving and banking is very much something you can learn in a sim. You can't learn how it feels (though a motion platform can help you practice getting coordinated), but you can sure see how it looks from the cockpit, and again, on the instruments. DCS is not WT, while you're not required to use proper techniques outside certain training missions, learning and applying them pays off. We should, I think, distinguish between "take off from taxiway and turn the jet straight to the front line" kind of DCS player from one who actually bothers to learn proper flying. A competent simmer will learn RL techniques for flying aircraft, because those techniques exist for a reason. Besides, there are aircraft in the sim, like the Spitfire, that will punish lousy flying (especially TO and landing) technique hard. Also worth noting, single engine GA aircraft are harder to fly than an airliner, or a modern fighter for that matter. Significantly so, in fact. The very fact of having a piston engine to manage (forgot carb heat when descending? Too bad, you're now a glider), as well as prop effects to deal with, give them challenges that larger jets don't suffer from, and turboprops suffer much less. Also, tricycle versus taildraggers, put a real pilot in the latter who only flew the former, and there will be pain (and possibly a shredded prop). BTW, this particular issue will be familiar to any longtime jet player dipping his toe in warbirds for the first time. So it's also a good question, what exactly is the non-pilot trying to land, and just what did he fly in the sim.

No, I mean "do you need to know this at all" before you get into the plane. On your own, with no assistance, you'll still go "hey, this is heavy!" for a minute or two, jerk it around a bit, then your brain will adjust and you'll be flying as usual (and if you go simming right after landing, your home rig will briefly feel too light). Similar to switching between a car with and without power steering, they control the same, only in one of them, you need to put some muscle into it. If you don't have that minute or two, then you're probably in a situation that'd be difficult to recover from even for an experienced pilot. Our brains are flexible and if you've got the right intuition as to how to actuate the controls, actually doing it is relatively simple. Now, greasing the landing can be a different matter if you're not aware of certain aerodynamic peculiarities like updrafts and downdrafts (not modeled in DCS except for the carrier's burble, but present in the civvy sim) or some quirk pertaining to the specific aircraft, or if you learned to land on a naval aircraft and smashing the ship into the deck is your SOP. That said, you should still be able to stay alive, and it's not like an actual pilot's license magically grants you the power to land smoothly every single time, anyway...

It greatly depends on the aircraft, and if you have mechanical controls, it'll also depend on airspeed. One of the primary considerations when diving in WWII era was to avoid going so fast that you won't have the physical strength to haul back on the stick and pull the aircraft out of the dive. If you're not going very fast, it's going to be much easier. Then, you've got individual aircraft quirks. Spitfire, for instance, is well known for needing very little stick force to throw it around the sky. FFB joysticks on market can get close to a real Yak-9 (another example of remarkably light controls), but will fall short of the forces most hydraulic systems are tuned to. I heard somewhere that the stick forces for US aircraft were standardized based on the P-51 control forces, presumably during cruise.

Here's the thing, do you actually need to know those things beforehand to be able to fly an airplane? Yes, real aircraft controls are stiff, and few home rigs come close. Mostly because most home furniture can't take that kind of forces, you need at least a frame simpit to handle a realistic gimbal without bending. FFB bases can help, but even then, commercial offerings still fall short of real fighter controls. Still, if that's the main difference, you should be able to adjust after a short period. One thing you can't learn while sitting in a chair is how moving your own body feels, though people do build DIY motion platforms. This can be a safety-critical effect. That said, we don't have the "seat of pants" feeling in the sim, so we compensate by staring at the instruments. That's actually the safest way to fly a real airplane, provided you have the instruments in first place.

Actually, the datalink does work, so BRAA calls aren't the only way to get SA using the E-2. We may be missing some features of CEC, but at least the Tomcat can link up and get tracks from one, I think the Hornet can do that, too.

The difference is that you're able to see how much flight path deviation you have, if you don't do this perfectly. A "direct to" command assumes you mean to fly in straight line from your current position to the designated point. Particularly when the ATC clears you direct to some point, you'll be expected to stick to that line reasonably closely.

WP military hardware typically had Russian language cockpits. Russian was usually taught in schools the way English is now, so that wouldn't have been an issue.

Do you know how the Flying Banana handled this? Looking at the pics, it doesn't seem to have much in way of flight assists, what with being a 50s design. Then again, perhaps it was simply very hard to fly, not exactly unusual with helos of the time.

I've had a problem with SimAppPro not seeing a collective plugged into a port on an USB card. Only "native" mobo ports worked.

It's the same because ED has coded the animations for the Hornet, and the appropriate animation for the Tomcat is not part of what they did. It'd be nice to see era-appropriate gesture for the Tomcat, but I don't see it coming anytime soon, given how half-baked many of the deck crew features are (magic teleport, anyone?).

That's the normal way of doing it. I went on a big binge when I started out because COVID was going around, there was a big sale and I just got my first VR headset, but even then, I didn't buy everything, just the stuff I thought I'd like. After that, it's been a steady trickle. Oh, and don't worry about never catching up with new releases. Module development takes a long time, and even campaigns are a lot of work to create, so they come out rather slowly. Even if you do put the sim away for a while, you'll catch up faster than devs can add content. With multiplayer, it's a bit different, but there, you really have to study and learn the aircraft in order to be any good.

It's not a fallacy when you consider that for an SSD, the probability of failure is proportional to how often the drive is being written to. Game files are updated much less often than ones on the OS drive would be (which is usually chock full of temporary stuff), meaning that having other data on different drives does reduce the likelihood of a total loss. In theory, a larger SSD should take more writes, but in practice, this isn't always true. If one of those spares is bootable, you have actual redundancy, in that you can recover, with most of your data intact, from losing your primary OS drive.

Yeah, because that wouldn't happen IRL, either. Demotion is something you get for a far more serious violations than prematurely wearing out Tomcat airframes (albeit doing that too much could affect your promotion chances). When Dynamic Campaign comes, you could this become a consideration, because aircraft would then have realistic downtimes, and an overstressed jet would probably have a longer one due to maintenance having to check for more things like whether the wing box is still good.

Now that I look at it, it might be, it doesn't appear to change its angle regardless of its position. That'd be very unusual for a Western aircraft, though, I've only seen linear throttles in Russian jets. Well, it'd work for Hornet and Tomcat, at least. Could also use it to adjust throttle friction. It even had a name, Cyber Taurus.

You don't need to own everything. Start with one module, learn it, see if you can master it. It takes a while. Each aircraft has its own control scheme, its own quirks, and its own way of doing things. It's not like in other games, where you have shared control assignments and all aircraft operate in a similar way. If you only buy things when they're on sale, and spread the costs out, they're manageable.

The penalty is not meaningless, if you pull more than you're supposed to in the RAG, you'll get dinged for it. S&A is a RAG campaign, at least until the point that you deploy, at which point suddenly nobody cares about you over-Ging the jet. Real F-14 pilots said it was indeed like that: they teach you to fly the plane within its published limits, but if you have to trap heavy, or pull more Gs in order not to die, then you do that. Nobody would give you too much grief if you pulled a little hard in regular operations. That said, if you make a habit of pushing the airframe beyond its design limits, you'll end up shortening its operational life. It won't show during one mission unless it was already on its last legs, but if you keep abusing your jet regularly, it's going to drag down readiness rate (because the jets will be spending more time in maintenance), and you're going to get a talk from the CAG. An old airframe in early 2000s will have lower safety margins than a new one in the 80s, but even the former will have some. It would be considered unsafe to fly otherwise.

Plus, there's a sale on standalone (coming soon to Steam), so it's a good time to buy modules you like at a discount. You can save a good bit on the older modules.

I guess we do, I forget about those because they never seem to do a whole lot in DCS.

Computer Pilot is classic CCIP, used for dive bombing. It's accurate, but it exposes you to enemy fire. It also requires you to acquire your target visually before you start to roll in on it. This is not always easy. If you're attempting to bomb something like a tank, it's the best mode to use. Computer Target is safer and less accurate. It has the same disadvantage as CCIP of requiring your to designate the target visually, but it allows you to come off earlier. You can move the designator box around the HUD to enable this to be done in level flight, but it works best on buildings or entire troop formations. For point targets, you can try diving on them, designating, then immediately pulling out. Designation from long distance and a level release will only be good for bombing buildings. Loft bombing works with LGBs and CBUs (which our Tomcat doesn't have). Doing that with dumb bombs will not be terribly accurate. Computer IP is useful when you know where the target is in relation to some landmark, but even less accurate than Computer Target. This would be particularly useful at a time before detailed satellite maps, when charts could have coordinate deviations on order of hundreds of meters. But if you know something like "the target is 1km east from a funny looking rock" (which is relatively easy to figure out with geometry), you can pass this information to the aircrew. Since the IP is a distinctive object that can be designated, and you don't need to see the thing you're bombing, this mode can be quite useful for dropping a stick of bombs on a target which would otherwise be hard to spot directly.

The idea was basically a Shrike for fighter radars. Not stupid or even particularly hard to do in itself, but R-27P doesn't have enough range for an AWACS killer (EP would've been better, but not by that much), and against fighters, the P would've been easy to trash by just turning cold for a while. It could work for tail warning radars on bombers and the like, but this would be a niche use. It's also worth noting that passive homing doesn't give you range, which means it'd have to guide on azimuth and altitude only, reducing range and PK. In the end, the ER version is just far more practical.

Yes, it appeared in videos, but I'm pretty sure it was the FC3 version. I was talking about Wags' tutorials, which would be about the MiG-29, specifically on how to do various things with it.

Not just in DCS. VOG-30 grenades have only 40g of explosive in them. The HEI-T shells from the cannon have 49g of explosive. Of course, the cannon is much bulkier and heavier than the AGL, and so is its ammo, not to mention the AGL has very little recoil in comparision. AGS-30 is a solid weapon for infantry use. In fact, ArmA players will know how quickly one of those can ruin your day as an infantryman. However, their steep trajectory and short range make it a poor helo weapon. Anything it can do, some other weapon in your arsenal can do better.

You want proofreading, just release it in EA and the community will give you an earful about any bad English that snuck in.

It's unlikely that's still the plan, given that Q1 is just about over, and we haven't seen any Wags videos about it. That said, one advantage of the MiG-29 is that it's not a glass cockpit. Like the Hind, the systems are limited to what's on dials and switches in the cockpit. There's no perpetually WIP MFD system with all sorts of obscure pages, the only screen in the cockpit is a dumb HUD repeater. While the HUD can do a few cool things, it's not an MFD.